7 days left!

Naturally, I flipped out and started to hyperventilate. I soon realized that it was the same weekend I had to leave on saturday to participate in a competition elsewhere.

I knew I should’ve looked sooner! I could’ve tied the vote! XD

Anyhow, despite these problems, I’ll still try and get something in. So, that’s all.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-14/

I plan to leave it up for about a week, so act now. If you entered MiniLD #14, please give your fellow entries a spin. We need a majority of you to vote on everything to get some decent statistics.

Good luck!

EDIT: Aaaaand switched off. See link above for results.

Here is our entry for Mini Ludum Dare 14

You play the role of the mustachioed newspaper editor who is trying to maintain a balanced coverage of world events.

When the game loads, press any key to begin and then use the up/down arrow keys to catch incoming headlines.

Some are tragic… some are comic… your balance-o-meter will tell you fair and balanced you are being in your headline gobbling.

Headline sources include realtime Google News Feeds and Onion. Comedy? Tragedy? I dunno.

• Windows Download
• Linux Download
• Mac OS X Download

Congrats to everyone who took part! It looks like we had 13 participating teams, which is a lot more than I expected given the complications with the rules this time – you can view all the entries here. Let’s have a playing party in irc sometime this weekend

Next month is THE REAL Ludum Dare, with proper deadlines and everything! Find out more here.

Thanks again to everyone who took part, and congratulations!

Anyway, the game is sort of a platform rts, kind of, with rabbits. You can get it from the LD entry page, or via direct download link (Windows exe).

Tools: Game Maker 7, Photoshop.

If you’d like to know a bit more about the game and the creation process, and how the heck it fits with the theme, just hit the break (you may want to try playing the game first, as it’s a bit spoilery):

So basically, we decided to go pretty literal with the tragedy theme, and try to make a game about exploitation, racism, and genocide. Wow, that’s a mouthful. We also wanted to try to work in the humor angle somehow (crazy, I know), which is one of the reasons we went with cute bunnies exploding. There’s nothing about the game that’s “haha” funny, but there is kind of a black humor there, I think.

The idea was to make a game that started out looking like a basic resource management/rts kind of thing (and cute, to boot), but then gradually became more and more sinister, ending with the player complicit in genocide. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time because genocide, racism, oppression of minorities are very real problems in places I’ve lived, and I want to see games that speak to issues like these. I’ve also always thought that something like this would work well as a game, because so many games are actually already about genocide, but the games are abstracted enough that players don’t really consider that what they’re being asked to do is wipe out another race of people, or robots, or whatever. So in a way, the game is a critique of gaming, and game playing. No so much saying that games like StarCraft or Total Annihilation are bad (two of my favorite games of all time, actually), but just asking people to think. I also wanted to get away from the classic idea of “balancing the sides,” by pitting the player against a game where the sides were clearly unbalanced. I think a two player game where one player played the aggressor and the other played the victim would be great.

Anyway, this is all mostly theoretical mumbo jumbo, and I’m certainly not claiming to have accomplished any grand goals with the game we managed to produce in five days.

About that. Here’s a little timeline:

As the game stands right now, a lot of necessary coding work is in place to make something decent, I think, but a lot needs to be polished up, and balanced out, etc. etc. We had very little time, at the end of the process to make the actual levels for the game, which would have ideally had more time set aside for them. There’s a lot to be done! But I would love to get any feedback anyone is willing to give.

I think that’s about all I have to say at the moment. It’s been fun, and I am looking forward to playing the other entries!

Here is the game Andy Wolff and I made.
It’s a game about a small boy in a large sewer. It’s your job to get him to interact with his surroundings in the hope to find the five different endings. I’d like to think of this as a complicated love story with the raw emotions of humans really showing. It brings up the complexity of how people deal with relationships and ultimately what they do to keep them alive. It’s very deep.

download (windows)

It’s a two-player co-op game, where the two players see the world from wildly different perspectives. One funny (the two players are clowns in a world made of gift-boxes, throwing pies at walking piñatas), the other tragic (you play as soldiers mindlessly killing innocent civilians).

The compo version (about 48 hours) can be found here (Windows) and here (Linux/source).

An updated version (added health packs/candy, a score meter, changed the screen-size, added a full-screen option, and made the game a bit more difficult, to keep the players together) can be found here (Windows) and here (Linux/source).

As you’d expect, being a collaboration between all of the top minds behind your favourite video games, CTC:TUC:DCE stands at the top of its field as a rare example of the perfect game. Get ready for a non-stop action-packed rollercoaster ride of intense gameplay, beautiful graphics, and epic storytelling, backed by one of the most masterfully composed soundtracks in recent memory… and that’s just on the menu screen. CTC:TUC:DCE will keep you glued to your computer from start to finish and leave you begging for more when it’s over.

To miss this is to make the biggest mistake of your life.

“This is, perhaps, the deepest game I’ve played in my whole career as a gamer. A truly astonishing experience.” ~ LFF, co-creator of CTC:TUC:DCE
“I agree.” ~ chuchino, producer of CTC:TUC:DCE
“Stunning… simply stunning. Easily the best indie game released this year.” ~ theindiegamereviewers.com
“Play CTC, and you’ll never want to go to any other game ever again. It worked with me several times.” ~ Acium Radd, age 13
” 一度幸せな星に “は来た; CLOWN 望まれただれ世界を変えたか彼は生命および愛を持って来たそして全体的なしかし中心のチッカーのまわりの子供へ笑うことはカチカチ音をたてることを止めた 彼のとして”を受け取った; CLICK そして悲しさは消えた. 10/10/10/10″ ~ Famitsu
“I heard it has clowns. Can’t go wrong with clowns.” ~ quakster, creator of Megaman sprite comic B.O.L.D.
“Awesomely cool…” ~ Roger Ebert

Download now!

http://pixelverse.org/portfolio/quixote/

Quixote Screenshot

Striking mess on the stage indeed...

A MiniLD #14 entry by Tût-tûûût  & Tenoch

(a.k.a. smots)

Get it here. (Available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows)

Sources are inside the .love file, which is a renamed zip. You can also find there the music/graphic files, if you want to listen/watch them out of the game.

Might follow a postmortem post, once we both get some sleep to compensate the week-end. And yay for including wednesdays in week-ends.

Here is a copy of the README file, which contains instructions for the game:

An divine love story

Hello, I’m Dionysos. I hope you’ll be able to help me.

You see, I think that two women are in love with me. This wouldn’t be a big problem if only these two women were not… goddesses. Yes: they are Thalia, the Muse of comedy, and Melpomene, the Muse of tragedy…

Out of jealousy, they try to destruct the art of each other: while a tragedy is being played somewhere on the world, Thalia messes up the mind of the actors and makes them play a comedy! So does Melpomene in comedies, of course.

I can’t make a choice between them: they are equally important for the human kind. And, as you will see, they are equally… cute.

I borrowed a few thunderbolts from Zeus and I strike the one that shouldn’t be on the stage. I hope this will calm down their anger…

The game

You’ll be randomly Thalia or Melpomene (you don’t need to know their names in fact). As a consequece, you’ll be either Comedy or Tragedy, represented respectively by pink and blue.

You must turn all the actors from your rival into actors of your Art. Easy game, isn’t it?

However, there are not only actors on stage: there is scenery, too! You’ll win when all the props on the stage are in your color. There is a bar on the left to let you know the repartition of the objects. You can’t interact with props. Only actors can. But you can inspire them…

Oh, and there is the other Muse on the stage, too. Otherwise it would be much more boring, you see. She can do the same things as you: turn your actors to her side.

Control

Move your Muse with the arrows of your keyboard.

“Switch” an actor with the spacebar.

Push escape to… escape.

Licensing

Source code is copyright Agnès Haasser & Noé Falzon, released under the
GNU GPL v3.

All music is copyright Noé Falzon, released under cc-by-nc-sa.

All graphical assets are copyright Agnès Haasser, released under
cc-by-nc-sa.

Here in France, it is 2:40 AM. I’m hungry and so does my partner Tenoch (or at least so did he. Now, he’s eating bread with pieces of butter. I guess. Given that he’s in Finland I can only imagine). We have almost finished our game (well, he has almost finished, since I’m writing weird things to post on the blog), whom name is quite easy to remember : SMOTSBOTJOACDG. Nice, isn’t it ?

Ok, actually we just call it SMOTS. This name comes from a messy story of jealous girls… Jealous muses, exactly. It takes place on a greek drama stage, and there is an incredible love story . But you’ll also find a coat stand, a cactus, cerberus and a whale. And several very cute girls. Tenoch-approved.

Well, I don’t want to spoil the whole thing.

Just wanted to say this was my first LD. Anyway it was very impressive ! I lost my partner on satudray night (he took the longest break of his life), so I coded alone from saturday to sunday 2:00 PM in a language I discovered on… friday. About 6 PM, I think. Finally it was OK, Tenoch is a nice geek and his code is well documented

Well, that was nice. And fun. Next time I may play the game in solo ! But first I’ll have to finish my presentation for tomorrow 8:00 AM, and eat, and… ah, maybe sleep a little. Just a little. Or not. Wait and see.

I hope you’ll enjoy smotsing.

It’s called Slapstick!

Play it in your browser here, or download a Windows executable here. Make sure you click in the game window after it loads up, otherwise it won’t receive any of your keystrokes.

Doches and I had a great time making this. This game is our take on Greek theater. You will be playing two games at the same time. The hero’s on top, the chorus is on the bottom. I made the hero, and Doches made the chorus. These are two separate games, guys. Two Ludum Dares in one pot.

WSAD = control the top game. Arrows = control the bottom game. Both games have a progression, and you win the whole conglomeration if you win either game. You cannot lose, but you will find yourself in trouble if you neglect either of the games.

This was a crazy experience for us. Lots of fun. Okay, it’s buggy and it’s rough! But that was part of the plan! These two games didn’t meet each other until a couple of short hours ago, and they are still getting to know each other!

I hope this variety of blindfolded parallel game development can be expanded into some larger events in the future, because it’s been a pleasure. We hope you will have as much fun trying to wrap your head around it as we did wrapping our arms around it.

Doches + Hamburger == Dochburger

My new friend Doches and I are teaming up to bring you some Greek drama. A double feature of it, in fact!

Doches has been most kind in sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of the classic dramatic form with me, and we’ve also talked a bit of game design. An epic email thread, currently 20 communications in length, sits even now in my gmail repository, where it shall remain for eternity (or until Google gets shut down by the DOJ, whichever comes first).

Our plan is to bring you two games that play in parallel, one by Doches and one by me. Two very different games, developed in separate vacuum chambers, which toward the end of the weekend shall be suddenly smacked together into an amalgamation of some kind. Our primary goal (or mine, at least) is to end up with something jarring and weird.

We have a really exciting plan for connecting the two games, and have spelled out in detail the exact set of 6 functions that each game must expose. I believe this is what real programmers call an INTERFACE! This is some serious OOP we’re doing here, my friends. Bjarne would be proud. As I put it, somewhere deep within our epic thread:

It’ll be like painting a beautiful work of art, then duct taping a light socket to one end and screwing it into somebody else’s painting. It’ll be like overlaying a corporate management structure onto an artistic endeavor. It’ll be like making the most of a bento box.

We look forward to it.

Yours sincerely,

Doches + Hamburger == Dochburger

First screenshot:  http://ippa.se/ghost.PNG

Rubyc0de @ http://github.com/ippa/ghost

You just died, floating above your cross… such a tragedy..

Like the last TIGSource contest, this contest has a dual theme. You and you teammates can choose to use either theme, or both.

The themes are Comedy and Tragedy.

Unlike other Ludum Dares, this time you are required to collaborate! (If you haven’t found a partner yet, see the post below this one.) If your team decides to use both themes, each member should take creative responsibility of one theme each and ensure it finds a place in the game.

You can make the game at any stage this weekend that suits you. And don’t worry if you can’t start for a few days or if the project goes a little beyond the usual 48 hours – I have a very loose definition of weekends that includes Wednesdays.

Whenever you’re ready, you can submit your game here!